In the Heat of the Light

chapter 3

The battered Civic swerved into the parking lot of a tired two-story brick building. Sol stopped, keeping the car running. She looked away as Zed leaned forward and kissed Apollo’s neck then opened the car and sprinted toward the building. “She’s got twenty minutes,” Theo declared. “Let’s make it count.” Sol winced at Theo in the rearview mirror then drove the car back to the main road, making a left. He thought he was in charge again. Nah.

More weary brick buildings greeted them as they drove toward the Comm Center, the Army’s former satellite communications hub. Sol peered out the window excitedly. She had never been on a military base before. She marveled at how vulnerable it looked. She’d expected turrets and glass shards and land mines, but this place looked like a college campus.

“Left,” Kai quickly said.

“This f*****g server better be here, Apollo,” Sol growled as they approached the Comm Center.

° ° °

Apollo paid Sol no mind. In five minutes, he’d successfully jammed the base’s ragtag video surveillance network, but he wanted to keep an eye on traffic. He knew that even if they weren’t caught in the act, which was actually starting to seem possible, they also didn’t need to be caught after the act. A cramped MINI Cooper wasn’t exactly an ideal getaway car.

Sol stopped the car in front of a sleek modern building. The engine grumbled off. Apollo hopped out, his open laptop swinging unsteadily in his hands as he raced toward the entrance. Even though he knew he’d be able to hack the satellite as planned, he had to hack it while it was passing over Austell, Georgia, giving him a twenty-minute window. The problem was that he had no idea where the control server for the satellite was located within the building. WikiLeaks was always very forthcoming when it came to secret government programs and secret roads and secret plots, but secret building interiors were still beyond its means. Apollo exhaled heavily as he approached the door, passing a flagpole. The run had been farther than he thought. He wasn’t sure if it was defensive design or the military just being extra. He decided to look it up later.

The door was unlocked. Apollo stepped into a bare lobby, furnished with a plain marble desk, folded plastic chairs, and a portrait of former president Barack Obama. “Damn, this place is old,” Apollo muttered. The only indicator that this building had previously been occupied by the military was its presence on the base. It easily could have been a generic office building. Apollo feared the worst. The military had cleaned this place out, he knew it. He anxiously ran toward the elevators, pressing the call button and searching for a directory. He sweated profusely; the AC was very off. The building had ten floors, but the directory was blank, erased. Lone letters lingered like unfinished alphabet soup, but they were too scattered to be decoded. Apollo mashed the call button.

The elevator arrived, and he stepped in, eyeing the access panel then checking the time. He had fifteen minutes to find the server, hijack the satellite, and tag Six Flags as planned. It wasn’t enough. He stopped to focus. Webpages, codes, and images of Zed flashed in his head. His heart was beating so fast he could feel his pulse in his right eye. After three silent minutes, he pressed the button for the second floor, reasoning that the floor with the servers would be excessively air-conditioned. The second-floor doors opened. Apollo felt no change in temperature, so he pressed the button for the third floor. Again, no change. He had seven floors and twelve minutes left. He began to feel his pulse in both eyes.

The eighth floor greeted him with a blast of chilled air. He ran into a dimly lit hallway, his worn gray Vans skidding as he abruptly halted in front of the only door in sight. Apollo sighed as the ice-cold doorknob obligingly turned. He’d found it.

Tall black servers lined the room like library bookshelves, haughtily stretching toward the ceiling. After plugging in his laptop, Apollo quickly leaped over the firewall, connecting to the local network and accessing the satellite. He had nine minutes. His fingers pecked at the keyboard, summoning the satellite’s celestial eye. Faint lights and dark green shapes scurried across his retina as he initiated the satellite’s onboard laser. Apollo stopped to take it all in.

How could Atlanta be so large, yet so small in his mind? Activating the laser, he gasped, shocked that it was real, quickly laughing at the absurdity of his surprise. The government had an actual weaponized laser in space, and he was not only controlling it, he was about to do graffiti with it. Even after all this planning and research, it was still jarring.

The burner rang, directing Apollo’s attention to the time. “f**k!” he screamed, ignoring the call. He’d blown it. The satellite was now too far east to accurately hit their chosen target; the margin of error was too high outside of the measured time window. He’d triple-checked. He violently kicked one of the servers, then stared at the phone, an ancient Nokia with a sickly green glow that dully radiated from its plain screen. The missed call was from Andromeda, the phone that had been assigned to Zed. He couldn’t call her back. Tasked with manually shutting down the satellite’s remote access panel and then running two and a half miles to the Comm Center, she had been the most at risk. She could have taken a fist or a Taser or a golf cart or a bullet. Apollo would not let her down. Pocketing his phone, he sat down, his eyes lingering on the satellite’s continuing images of Atlanta.

Running trails and camping grounds trickled into his view. He knew this place. It was Stone Mountain Park, the site of his first mosquito bite and premier destination for the occasional white power rally.

He acted quickly, directing the satellite’s eye to the park’s main attraction: the mountain. Entering the coordinates, he activated the laser, impatiently waiting for it to finalize. Scripts scurried across his screen like excited ants then abruptly stopped, replaced by a static blackness. Apollo gawked at the screen, disappointed. There hadn’t even been an Are you sure you want to do this? message. The government continued to disappoint him.

A magnificent orange pillar suddenly erupted into view, ripping through the firmament and descending onto the park with unnatural fury, plowing into the mountain. Even from his proxy celestial perch, Apollo could feel the destruction being wrought, the stone and sediment becoming mobile after millennia of stasis. An entire ecosystem of birds seemed to retreat into the sky, fleeing the devastation. Apollo watched in awe as the air along the beam’s path quivered, it too touched by the beam’s furious omnipotence. He swore to never again shake an aerosol can. He had felt subversive before, but this was power. He was no longer marking territory; he was seizing it from the earth, altering it in his image.

Apollo was entranced by the laser’s raw power. Time unwound as he watched the geyser of light glide across the earth, his screen shaking as the beam pulverized the mountain and its surroundings. The feed lacked audio, but that put Apollo at ease; the drone bombings he’d seen were also soundless. After three sublime minutes, the pillar of light dissolved to black, and a smile crawled from Apollo’s eyes to his lips as he saw a distinct shape take form.

° ° °

“He f****d up. Let’s leave him,” Sol suggested.

“f**k you,” Zed huffed, her utter seriousness obvious despite her heaving breaths. Theo squeezed Kai’s hand. Everything was going downhill. Sol was acting crazy, Zed said the remote access panel had been removed, and Apollo wasn’t answering his phone. He felt trapped. They had to get off this base before it got worse.

Kai spoke up, her voice confident. “Apollo’s fine. Traffic looks normal around Six Flags, but Stone Mountain is looking wild. I think Apollo might have upgraded their weird laser show.” She passed her phone to Sol, who stared blankly at the sea of red dots forming around the mountain’s winding roads.

“Not bad,” Sol admitted. “Let’s just hope he was smart enough to leave Z, E, and D out of his tag.” They laughed.

Tension returned as they heard the frantic thump of shoes hitting concrete. Apollo was sprinting toward the car at top speed, spittle leaking from his mouth alongside garbled words. “Drive!” he demanded when he reached the vehicle, slamming his hand on the car’s roof and jumping into the passenger’s seat. Sol reacted quickly, starting the car and veering out of the parking lot in one cool motion.

“What happened?” Theo asked.

“Tyler Perry bought the rights to The Boondocks.”

Zed swung at the back of Apollo’s neck with an open palm, the smack resonating with the dull sound of flesh hitting flesh. Apollo didn’t say anything, but Theo swore he could still hear echoes from the slap.

Sol smashed the throttle as they headed back toward their entrance, then slowed to a crawl as they neared the gate. The gate was still mangled, but Campbellton was clear. There were neither cops in the bushes nor concerned citizens on the sidewalk. As expected, this part of the city didn’t produce patriots. Theo wasn’t surprised; it didn’t even produce rappers.

To Theo, their arrival at Zed’s car seemed instantaneous. He asked Sol to allow him one final ride. She agreed, leaving the keys in the ignition and stepping out to join Zed and Apollo, who were walking toward Zed’s car. Kai remained in the back seat.

Theo got out the car and stretched. A slight breeze grazed his face, momentarily cooling the hot night. It wasn’t enough. A thin layer of sweat insisted on forming. He sighed. The entire ordeal had taken a little over a half hour, but Theo felt like he had aged a year. He leaned on the roof of the car, taking it all in. Both his graduation money and now his car were gone. Maybe even his life, if this night had any more surprises. This wasn’t even remotely how his summer before college was supposed to go. At least he had those three C-notes?

Kai tapped on the back window, gesturing for him to get back into the car. They needed to leave. Theo slid into the driver’s seat, flustered. Did they really have to destroy the car? A nigga in a busted Civic was as natural as algae in a creek. What wasn’t natural was going to the police station to report a fake crime on the same night you committed a real crime. Wasn’t there a Biggie song about that? And Apollo had disabled the base’s surveillance, hadn’t he? They had gotten away with it, definitely. Probably. If they hadn’t, that laser would have already gotten them, probably before they even got off the base. Excessive precaution could be just as dangerous as naivete. Theo made up his mind. No need to get all surgical with it, throwing body parts to unfed pigs. The night was a success. Theo cranked the engine and pulled out slowly.

“Where are we going?” Kai asked. Theo stared straight ahead. For once, he knew where he was headed.

The wrecked van was just as they’d left it, implanted in the trunk of a tree at the bottom of the hill on Central Villa. Theo slowed and parked on the side of the road. Kai removed her flaming red wig and shook out her curls. They exited the car, reaching the trunk in two exhausting steps. Goddamn, it was hot.

Gasoline containers in tow, they quickly emptied them on the wreckage as Zed, Apollo, and Sol watched from inside the MINI. Theo watched Kai place her gas container on the ground then walk over to Zed’s car, sticking out her hand. The driver’s window slid down and her hand was quickly filled with two phones and a laptop. “That’s not all the gas, right?” Theo heard Sol ask. Kai ignored her and sprinted to the van, emptying her hands. The electronics hit the ground with a dull, unsatisfying thud. She gave her burner, the only one that was a smartphone, a particularly strong toss. It had come preloaded with MapQuest; it deserved the worst. Theo smiled when the screen shattered on impact.

Retrieving her gas container, Kai used the last few drops to douse the wig. Brandishing her lighter, she lit it then tossed it into the wreckage.

She and Theo swiftly filed back into his car. Following Kai’s directions, he pulled out quickly and headed toward Cascade Road. Theo hoped for an explosion, but he had watched enough Mythbusters to know better. Instead, he listened as Kai watched videos of their laser tag on Twitter. He couldn’t wait to see what the tag said in the morning, and he couldn’t wait to see Sol’s response to the change of the change of plans. He hated when she stepped up to solve his problems.

I-285 appeared quickly, and the seven miles home seemed to appear even quicker, but even as the night glided by, Theo remained in that harrowing half hour. When his head finally hit his pillow after dropping off Kai and driving to Marietta, he didn’t feel relaxed. He felt poised, ready to take on whatever else the summer dared to offer and determined not to f**k it up.